Seven Home Truths About Jazz

by Minim ^Pro @ 2010-09-20 – 10:56:40
I don't know what's caused it, but in the last few days the average number of daily visitors to this site has rocketed and there are a whole host of new subscribers. If you're one of the new visitors then a very warm welcome and I hope you continue to enjoy the blog.

Much of the focus of PlayJazz in recent times has been to challenge some of the received wisdom about what it means to play our music and what we need to do to build interesting, musically satisfying and profitable careers.

A lot of my thoughts on this can be summarised in six 'home truths' about jazz in the modern world:

The Internet has changed EVERYTHING

Unprecedented access to music means that most of your potential audience can click a mouse and hear the greatest jazz musicians in history whenever they like. It's not like the old days when records were scarce and the only way to hear jazz was to hear it live.

Additionally, your competition is now every other jazz musician on the planet with internet access - how are you going to compete with that?

The old career model for jazz musicians no longer exists

In the good old days, all a jazz musician had to do to make a career for himself was to learn how to play. Gigs were plentiful and whilst you might never become a household name, you could quite happily make a living by working as a sideman.

Not so today. Today, gigs of any kind are hard to come by and there are far more jazz musicians than there are jazz gigs. The days when the ability to play jazz was a rare and valuable enough commodity to get you work are long gone.

If you want to build a career in jazz, you're going to have to do it a different way than the guys who came before you, because you live in a different world than they did.

Virtuosity is too common to be interesting

Virtuosity as an interesting feature in jazz performance has run it's course. In the old days, when music wasn't so available it was possible to stand out by being the best player in your town.

Today virtuosity is old hat. We hear so many incredible players from the past and present all the time that the impact of virtuosic music-making as a spectacle has dwindled to almost nothing. What's worse, the availability of recordings means your instrumental facility is not only going to be compared to your peers, but to every player of your instrument who ever recorded.

If you're a piano player, you're up against Tatum. If you're a sax player, you're taking on Bird. If you're a guitarist, you'd better be able to take George Benson to the cleaners. If you're a drummer, you'd better be able to run rings round Buddy Rich.

Whatever your instrument, you're not going to be able to rely on virtuosity as your USP any more. It's just too common these days.

Most grassroots jazz is BORING

Sorry, but it is. The same old tunes done in the same old way. The same vocabulary and phrasing rehashed again and again. The same pale imitation of the sound of classic Blue Note records.

Max Roach famously described jazz as 'the sound of surprise' and yet I can't remember the last time I went to a grassroots jazz gig and heard anything even remotely surprising.

Most of the jazz people hear today is predictable, clichéd and downright boring. It's the trio in the corner of the restaurant playing Autumn Leaves, it's the singer in the bar doing Girl From Ipanema, it's the quartet at the wedding playing fly me to the moon.

It's been done. To death. We're going to have to come up with something more interesting than that if we want people to listen properly.

Just because jazz is hard to play, it doesn't mean it's automatically valuable

This is one of the things that many jazz musicians struggle to accept. They spend years learning to play and can't understand why they aren't more valued or appreciated for their ability.

Unfortunately, the ability to play jazz isn't rare enough to be interesting in it's own right any more. Yes, it's incredibly difficult music to play well, but so what? If the music doesn't speak to an audience or communicate with them in some way, they simply won't want to listen to you.

Your musical ability as a thing in it's own right is worthless. It only
has a value to an audience when it is successfully used to communicate something.

The fact the music is hard to play doesn't make it automatically worthwhile to listeners. The sooner we realise and accept that, the sooner we'll start focusing on what really matters in the music.

You have to engage with people

The audience is not going to admire your skill, they're not going to value your hard-earned ability, they're not interested in your encyclopaedic knowledge of jazz vocabulary. Ultimately, if you can't connect with people and engage their emotions and feelings then you are going nowhere.

To be anything other than a musical hack, you absolutely must be trying to communicate with your music making and the only way you're going to get people to respond to you is by having something to say and saying it in your own way.

Think of musicians like Miles, Monk, Mingus and Duke. They were all great because they created an absolutely unique and personal conception of jazz that made their music instantly identifiable and unique.
Their music spoke to audiences. It still does.

And one thing that all of these musicians had in common was the search for a unique sound, something that would make them stand out and give them a new way of communicating.

What's more, they weren't afraid to break with convention to get their message across. What would have happened if Duke hadn't written his own compositions and had the band stick to standard repertoire and arrangements? What would have happened if Miles had carried on trying to be a better be-bop player?
What would have happened if Monk had tried to sound more 'idiomatic'?

The most revered musicians of all, in any genre, are the ones who develop a unique vision and follow their own instincts and sensibilities.

The most stylistically conventional are the first to be forgotten.

You are responsible for your own musical career

It's quite common to hear jazz musicians blaming everything else but themselves for their lack of success. Maybe it's down the schools, who don't provide enough education so that people don't demand better music. Maybe it's the record companies, who are only interested in shoving artificial rubbish on a gullible public. Maybe it's just that people in general are too shallow, ignorant and uncultured to recognise quality when they hear it.

Then again, maybe it's down to you. Maybe you never push yourself out of the comfort zone of rubbish gigs. Maybe you spend more time sitting around complaining instead of promoting yourself. Maybe you're too afraid of being judged to risk following your own path.

Ultimately it comes down to this: the musicians who accept responsibility for themselves and are prepared to take a risk to make it happen are in with a shot.

The rest will be stuck playing requests for Take Five and being ignored on rubbish gigs for the rest of their careers.
Until next time...

From  >>  http://playjazz.blog.co.uk/2010/09/20/seven-home-truths-about-jazz-9424498/